Hamill is the actor-playwright at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival who has adapted ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ – to rapturous reviews in ‘The New York Times’ as well as transfers off-Broadway. Both plays have had subsequent productions around the country, and Hamill intends to adapt all of Austen’s novels eventually.

It’s difficult to imagine how she might top her version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ – currently in its area premiere, staged by artistic director Joanie Schultz at the WaterTower Theatre. Given this show’s wind-tunnel level of energy and clattering theatrical cleverness (some of it devised by Schultz), when Hamill gets around to adapting ‘Mansfield Park,’ she may have to hire a troupe of Marx Brothers impersonators and let them thwack away happily at each other.

OK. So let’s address some important considerations:

First, the WaterTower production is indeed funny at times. Schultz’ direction is inventive. Furniture pieces don’t just roll on; actors use them like skateboards or wheelchairs. The quick-change drag acts are delightfully cheap and cheesy, and the re-configuration of the entire theater space is welcome (the set design is by Chelsea Warren). Austen’s characteristic wit does peep through occasionally in the dialogue, even though Schultz has a number of actors bark it out in Monty Python-shire accents. From the many absurdities being hurled at us, it seems almost inevitable the show would generate some laughs.

In fact, when the ‘Times’ reviewed the debut of the stage version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in Hudson Valley, it hailed it as “madcap.“

If anything, the novelist’s writing has been faulted for the opposite – for being too discreet, too prim, too fiddly with the tell-tale details of class insecurity. Charlotte Bronte famously dismissed Austen for never leaving her well-trimmed garden for the larger, darker world outside. This has been the great accusation her advocates have long denied: With all of human life to contend with, Austen is content to play a tastefully restrained round of ‘How to Win at Love and Estate Planning.’

Indeed, two years ago, when the Dallas Theater Center presented Hamill’s first adaptation, ‘Sense and Sensibility,‘ it reduced Austen’s novel to a trivial comedy of manners – in effect, fulfilling the charges of Austen’s critics. It was well-executed, droll, affected and frivolous.

But Emma Thompson – in her Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1995 film of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ – underlined how high the stakes actually were for Austen’s women. In words the novelist never wrote (she never needed to because her audience probably knew all this perfectly well), Thompson explained how marriage and male privilege utterly dominated the lives of the women: how little influence they had with families, fortunes or their own futures, how terrified they were by the loss of a male heir or the lack of an acceptable husband. And these dilemmas held true, even though Thompson’s adaptation made Austen’s men more feminist, sensitive and interesting than they are in the book.

It’s true playwright Hamill does include such a description of women’s confined roles in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ at the end of the first act. Mrs. Bennet, played by Wendy Welch, completely loses what meager self-control she’s had because her daughters have failed in their courtships. Our heroine, Lizzy, the sensible Bennet sister, has rejected a marriage offer from her creepy, social-climbing cousin Collins. At the same time, the pretty but shy daughter Jane has somehow lost a very lucrative possibility with the marriage-minded Mr. Bingley. The double-barreled loss causes Mrs. Bennet to read her daughters the riot act about money, marriage, women’s imperiled status in general and how the two of them have trashed the entire family’s future.

It’s also a speech that really doesn’t exist in the original. Perhaps Hamill learned something from Thompson’s screenplay.

At any rate, the stage speech – a rare opportunity for Welch to unleash her inner rampager – remains relatively weightless. Ma Bennet has already established herself with exclamations of mercenary interest (“Ten thousand pounds a year!” she wails repeatedly). Her expressions of financial fear are an embarrassment not just to her daughter, the eye-rolling Lizzy, but to her possible love interest, Mr. Darcy, as well as others of his wealthy social circle.

In Austen’s world, Mrs. Bennet concerns may be valid, but she is definitely Not a Serious Person. (John Mullan, author of ‘What Is Important in Jane Austen?: In the novels, important plot information is always delivered by “the stupid people.”) And as if to completely balloon-pop Mrs. Bennet’s warnings (and to end the act on the right note of imminent threat and humor), her speech is interlarded with several comic moments – to make sure we don’t take Mom’s warnings too gravely.

Second important consideration: With her first adaptation, ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ Hamill aimed for creating a bustling portrait of Regency society with a cast of 11 actors, almost all doubling and tripling in and out of roles, high and low. With ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ on the other hand, she seriously streamlines Austen’s story. She reduces it primarily to the immediate Bennet household and the three male suitors (thus, only eight actors are needed here).

This tighter focus tends to intensify Austen’s rom-com. It develops the energy and speed of out-and-out farce. Schultz has some actors go for broke with extravagant caricatures, mostly of supporting figures (Brandon Potter, Steph Garrett, Justin Duncan, Kate Paulsen). We don’t get Austen’s precision-targeted social satire of the English classes and their tell-tale differences so much as a visit to a family asylum.

But four performers (and their characters, of course) do recognize the general madness around them and choose, more or less, to withdraw from the emotional uproar. There’s Kate Paulsen’s delicate performance as Jane, the pretty sister, the family’s hope who cannot comprehend why she’s lost the marriage game, why she’s been abandoned by the dithering Bingley (Justin Duncan).

Meanwhile, as our heroine Lizzy, Jenny Ledel delivers another perfectly tuned performance. Her Lizzy is a smart cookie who’s earnest, exasperated, lovelorn and not as sharp as she’d like to think: Blind to her own longings, she chooses to reject the whole marriage-go-round entirely.

As the paterfamilias Mr. Bennet, Bob Hess has one of those choice little comic roles, the voice of defeated reason who’s given up trying to curtail the zanies around him. Hess knows the comic contrast is what plays well, so he enjoys himself hiding behind Mr. Bennet’s defensive wall of a newspaper and puncturing their outbursts with the occasional, droll observation. It’s also Hess’s later, drag portrayal of the woeful Charlotte Lucas, a friend of Lizzy’s, that lets us truly feel the poignant (and yes, comic) pains, the constricted choices for Austen’s women.

Finally, John-Michael Marrs plays Mr. Darcy as stiffer, sterner, more furrowed-browed than most. He doesn’t convey the inner, troubled smolder Darcy needs to suggest he’s attracted to Lizzy almost against his will. It’s only at the very end, when Ledel and Marrs are alone, that things quiet down enough that some of their central, motivating romance comes through.

Finally.

Third consideration: Despite appearances, I am not a loyal traditionalist, a member of the Cult of Jane, defending her honor against all updatings and directorial inventions. Quite the opposite. True, I enjoy the comic sharpness that her novels’ restraint grants them, as well as her hints at deeper, underlying fears. But she’s not really my cup of Darjeeling. I usually prefer the stronger stuff kept locked under the counter.

Which is why I could be convinced that this, the umpty-ump version of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ needs a little goosing with wild laughter. After all, scholars and purists were appalled by Colin Firth’s wet-shirted Darcy in the 1995 BBC mini-series, even as female Janeites ranked him their absolute fave.

Austen, of course – the product of a long line of clergymen – would never have written such a brazen scene. Or would she? Feminists have since countered that turnabout is fair play for the female gaze. A modern view of the male-as-sex object is one that Austen might have embraced, given that her subject is primarily women’s inner lives. Sex may remain the Great Unmentionable in her novels, but it’s hardly like female desire didn’t exist in 1813. So why not a hunky Darcy now – to shake things up and say what Austen might have wanted to but couldn’t?

Ergo, one might well argue that Schultz and Hamill are doing just this, cracking open the two-century-old carapace that confines the novel and making Austin more a farceur than a satirist. They give ‘P & P’ all this campy theatrical life and pop-culture in-jokery. The WaterTower show immediately announces that things will be unconventional (and more than a bit obvious) by opening with Wayne Fontanta’s 1965 hit, ‘The Game of Love.’ Schultz and Hamill promptly launch their wild and noisy sports anachronisms at us.

Schultz has everyone wearing athletic shoes (the costumes are by Sylvia Fuhrken). And the theater is laid out in what’s typically called “stadium seating.” The audience is divided into two sections, each seated on opposite sides of the playing area, like high school fans at a basketball game. The set is also armed with basketball hoops and there are referee whistles going off and penalty buzzers and a timekeeper’s bell.

Who knew the Regency liked nuthin’ but net?

In short, given the chance, Schultz never gives up hammering a joke. When anyone encounters the homely daughter Mary Bennet (played in drag by Duncan – in a black hoodie that makes him look like a resentful monk), they immediately flinch in shock at her appearance, clutching their heart. It’s an oldie but a goody. By the end of two hours, though, what was a running gag about her looks is dragging itself to the finish line.

With Austen’s satire, there has always been the touch of refined cruelty. At times, she’ll flat-out call a character “stupid.” (“For what do we live, but to make sport of our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?”). Here, the other characters’ repeated double-takes mock Mary for her looks, for what she can’t control (Austen depicts her only as plain, not actively gruesome). From the start, Mary is simply a loser in the all-important marital sweepstakes going on: For the women here, looks do count.

But when youngest daughter Lydia (Steph Garrett) crows that she’s slam-dunked the marriage-and-money game before her sisters have even gotten off the bench, she quickly learns she’s been headstrong and heedless. She ran off and got married without parental consent, sacrificing social approval for a quick win. Austen’s novels always embody lessons like this about balancing propriety with personal fulfillment. Along with her heroines, we readers learn how these people and their society and their inner motivations work and how they should act (it’s one reason some us find her occasionally irksome – those witty but preachy judgments about everything).

But the stage adaptation treats Mary shabbily; it’s not as understanding as Lizzy herself learns to be (and by extension, we do, too). I’ve gone on about Minor Mary at more length than the character merits solely because it’s a telling fault: The show’ll go for the laugh, not the character Austen created, not the humanity, not the quietly valiant feminism that Austen’s novels supposedly represent. And the show is certainly not going for the novelist’s famously dry restraint.

So one can’t help but feel that Hamill and Schultz have also been headstrong and heedless. For this adaptation’s exuberance, they’ve too easily sacrificed much of what makes Austen Austen.

Jerome Weeks is the Senior Arts Reporter/Producer for KERA. Previously at The Dallas Morning News, he was the book columnist for 10 years and the drama critic for 10 years before that. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, American Theatre and Men’s Vogue magazines. View more about Jerome Weeks.

I’m looking forward to seeing this. A quibble with your research however – it certainly has not been “years” since WaterTower changed up the seating. Last season’s “The Big Meal” was the exact same configuration as the show in this review.

JeromeWeeks

Thanks very much for the correction! I confess I didn’t see ‘Big Meal’ – but I could not recall ANY recent production at WaterTower, going back several seasons, that varied from the straightforward, somewhat proscenium/mild thrust layout the stage has had. The reason I brought it up is that the WaterTower was uniquely designed to be flexible. And here it is, being (primarily) inflexible. I realize re-configuring the stage layout costs money, and if you add that into a production’s budget, it can get very pricey over the course of a season. But it still seems like such a waste to have such a terrific facility and, well, NOT ‘never’ but so rarely take advantage of it.

Terry Martin

Hi Jerome – I appreciate your correction regarding your initial quote about not changing up the seating and the fact the “the Big Meal” was the exception to the theatre “being stuck” in the same configuration for years. I am going to quibble a bit more as I wouldn’t want your readers to think WTT is lazy. Actually 4 out of the 6 mainstage shows WTT presented in the 15-16 season were presented in alternative/non proscenium seating configurations. Besides THE BIG MEAL, CREEP, SEXY LAUNDRY, LORD OF THE FLIES all were in alternative configurations. All completly different configurations I might add. In the 14-15 season there was ALL MY SONS. And in 13-14, SPUNK. Of the 17 years I served as Producing Artistic Director, I think there was only one year where we did not change the configuration at least once and I believe that may have been the horrific 08-09 season where due to the financial crisis we really had to tighten our purse strings.

No laziness implied or intended. The comment reflects the costs of re-arrangement. The Dallas Theater Center’s original Arts District theater and the WaterTower Theater were both designed for maximum flexibility. And what both theater companies quickly learned is that re-configuring the stage requires increased work hours, increased costs. So it became simpler and more affordable to keep to one primary design layout per season – and vary it only occasionally, even rarely.

Naturally, I trust your facts, Terry, it just seems amazing to me that over the past 10 years, I’ve managed to miss so many of your reconfigured productions. The last one I could remember was ‘Grey Gardens’ in 2009 – eight years ago – and I could not recall any production with the stadium layout.

Terry Martin

It seems amazing to me as well. 🙂 Time flies right? Stadium or as we sometimes called it “Tennis Court” seating was used for (off the top of my head, in no particular order) The Big Meal, All My Sons, The Humble Boy, Violet, Enchanted April, The Spitfire Grill. Not sure if you are remembering Grey Gardens as reconfigured, but it was not. It was traditional proscenium. A few times we used an extremely elongated thrust that worked similar to stadium. Examples were Spring Awakening, As You Like It, Spunk, Book of Days. The only in-the-round setup we ever did under my leadership was A Country Life in 2004-05. Thanks for all you do for our arts community sir.

JeromeWeeks

Sigh. Given this evidence of my faulty memory, I shall not correct the statement but retract it completely (while leaving all these comments in place, of course).

Then I shall go and sit quietly and reflect on my failings and feel grateful that theaters provide programs so at least I don’t misspell actors’ names. Not often, at any rate.